An interesting tidbit in the EU data protection regs:

The European Parliament has finally passed their big redesign of data protection regulation. Nothing too shocking in there, in light of the Snowden fallout. One little item caught my eye tho:

 Data Protection Officers: the controller and the processor shall designate a data protection officer inter alia, where the processing is carried out by a legal person and relates to more than 5000 data subjects in any consecutive 12-month period.

Data protection officers shall be bound by secrecy concerning the identity of data subjects and concerning circumstances enabling data subjects to be identified, unless they are released from that obligation by the data subject. The committee changed the criterion from the number of employees a company has (the Commission suggested at least 250), to the number of data subjects. DPOs should be appointed for at least four years in the case of employees and two in that of external contractors.

The Commission proposed two years in both cases.

Data protection officers should be in a position to perform their duties and tasks independently and enjoy special protection against dismissal. Final responsibility should stay with the management of an organisation.

The data protection officer should be consulted prior to the design, procurement, development and setting-up of systems for the automated processing of personal data, in order to ensure the principles of privacy by design and privacy by default.

Not anything new here, but reviewing it made me thing about an interesting metric buried in there: the controller and the processor shall designate a data protection officer inter alia, where the processing is carried out by a legal person and relates to more than 5000 data subjects in any consecutive 12-month period ... The committee changed the criterion from the number of employees a company has (the Commission suggested at least 250), to the number of data subjects

First I liked the old metric of 250 employees per data protection officer. It tracked with my experience with about the right size to start having a dedicated security officer. But changing it to the size of pile of confidential data you're protecting is even more relevant.

When I was hired on in my current job, we were a smallish company but we were custodians of megatons of PII. And 5000 sounds about right, if nothing else, for breach numbers: If the average cost is around $136 per person's records breached, then 5000 x $136 = $680,000.

Okay, now we have our impact. The question is what is the probability of breach and how much does a dedicated DPO reduce that probability? Well, that probably varies on organization to organization, tho it'd be good to know some hard numbers. Something to munch on.

The other thing I liked in the regs is Data protection officers should be in a position to perform their duties and tasks independently which continues to support my position that infosec should not report into the IT hierarchy.